Propaganda was the genius of National Socialism. Not only
did it owe to propaganda its most important successes;
propaganda was also its one and only original contribution
to the conditions for its rise and was always more than a
mere instrument of power: propaganda was part of its
essence. What National Socialism meant is far less easily
grasped from the contradictory and nebulous conglomerate of
its philosophy than from the nature of its propagandist
stage management. Carrying it to an extreme, one might say
that National Socialism was propaganda masquerading as
ideology, that is to say, a will to power which formed its
ideological theorems according to the maximum psychological
advantage to be derived at any given moment, and drew its
postulates from the moods and impulses of the masses, in the
sensing of which it was abnormally gifted. In view of its
capacity for mediumistic communication with the 'mind' of
the masses, it seemed not to require any real idea, such as
had served to gather and hold together every other mass
movement in history. Resentments, feelings of protest of the
day and the hour, as well as that mechanical attachment
which arises from the mere activation of social forces,
replaced the integrative effect of an idea, in conjunction
with a gift of handling crowds that made use of every
technique of psychological manipulation. The majority of the
ideological elements absorbed into National Socialism were
nothing but material, assessed at varying degrees of
effectiveness, for a ceaseless pyrotechnical display of
propagandist agitation. Flags, Sieg Heils, fanfares,
marching columns banners and domes of searchlights — the
whole arsenal of stimulants, developed with inventive
ingenuity, for exciting public ecstasy was ultimately
intended to bring about the individual's self-annulment, a
permanent state of mindlessness, with the aim of rendering
first the party adherents and later a whole nation totally
amenable to the leaders' claim to power. The relative status
of ideology and propaganda is shown more clearly than
anywhere in that phraseology employed by numerous
contemporaries that referred to National Socialism as
'experience', a term that tacitly outlawed any cognitive or
critical approach. In fact this ideology was literally
indisputable and evaded all objective analysis by retreating
into the unimpeachable realms of pseudo-religious feelings,
where the Fuhrer reigned in solitary metaphysical
monumentality. To be sure, this flight into the irrational,
into regions where politics became a matter of faith, of
Weltanschauun, answered a vehement need of the
disoriented masses; nevertheless, there was a purposeful
Machiavellian guidance behind the direction and forms it
took, so that on closer inspection the apparently elemental
demand proves to be the planned and repeatedly re-awakened
irrationalism to which the modern totalitarian social
religions owe their support and their existence.

Joseph Goebbels was the brain behind this manipulation of
minds, 'the only really interesting man in the Third Reich
besides Hitler'. (1) One of the most astonishingly gifted propagandists of modern times, he stood head and shoulders above the bizarre mediocrity of the rest of the regime's
top-ranking functionaries. He was one of the few real powers in the movement's leadership, not merely a figurehead drawn into the light of history 'in the wake of the victorious cause'. These two, Hitler and Goebbels, complemented each other in an almost unique manner. For Hitler's sombre,complex-determined visions, his initiative, ecstatic
relationship with the masses, Goebbels found the techniques
of persuasion, the rationalizations, the slogans, myths and
images. It was from Goebbels that der Führer, the term by
which Hitler appeared as redeemer, demiurge and blessed
saviour, received its visionary content. He astutely turned
the initially irresolute Adolf Hitler into der Führer and
set him on the pillar of religious veneration. With
strenuous Byzantinism, consciously mingling the sacred with
the profane, he spread around Hitler that messianic aura
which so appealed to the emotions of a deeply shaken nation.
The cult of the Fuhrer, whose true creator and organizer he
was, not only exploited the need for faith and security, as
well as the German's latent urge to self-abandonment in the
face of a world stripped of its gods, but also gave the
rising NSDAP the solid backbone of a hierarchical structure.
The evidence of this cult is overwhelming. In Der Angriff,
the paper he founded as Gauleiter of Berlin, Goebbels wrote,
with a significant imitation [in the original] of biblical
cadences and alliterations:

Works of talent are the result of diligence, persistence,
and gifts. Genius is self-creative by grace alone. The
deepest force of the truly great man is rooted in instinct.
Very often he cannot even say why everything is as it is. He
contents himself with saying: it is so. And it is so. What
diligence and knowledge and school-learning cannot solve,
God announces through the mouths of those whom he has
chosen. Genius in all fields of human endeavour means — to
have been called. When Hitler speaks, all resistance breaks
down before the magical effect of his words. One can only be
his friend or his enemy. He divides the hot from the cold.
But lukewarmness he spits out of his mouth. Many can know,
even more can organize, but he alone in all Germany today
can construct the political values of the future out of
fateful knowledge through the power of the word. Many are
called, but few are chosen. We are all unshakeably convinced
that he is their spokesman and guide. Therefore we believe
in him. Over his inspiring human figure we see the grace of
destiny at work in this man and cling with all our hopes to
his ideal and are thereby bound to that creative force which
carries him and all of us forwards. (2)

Elsewhere Goebbels described his feelings for the Fuhrer as
'holy and untouchable'. He stated after a speech by Hitlerthat he had spoken 'profoundly and mystically, almost like a gospel', and affirmed in a protestation of loyalty:

'An hour may come when the mob rages around you and roars, "Crucify him!" Then we shall stand as firm as iron and shout and sing
"Hosanna!"' (3)

in one of his regular birthday addresses on the eve of 20th April, Goebbels declared, 'When the Fuhrer
speaks it is like a divine service (4) while in his early
journal, whenever he conjures up the image of Hitler, we
find passages in the most unbearably sentimental style,
reminiscent of an adolescent's diary:

We drive to Hitler. He is having his meal. He jumps to his
feet, there he is. Shakes my hand. Like an old friend. And
those big blue eyes. Like stars. He is glad to see me. I am
in heaven. That man has got everything to be a king. A born
tribune. The coming dictator.

Or elsewhere:

Hitler is there. Great joy. He greets me like an old friend.
And looks after me. How I love him! What a fellow! Then he
speaks. How small I am ! He gives me his photograph. With a
greeting to the Rhineland. Heil Hitler! I want Hitler to be
my friend. His photograph is on my desk.(5)

Hitler's position in the mass party that was being formed
was enormously reinforced by and received a positively
metaphysical endorsement from such idolatry. The cult
developed around his personality destroyed those beginnings
of internal democracy which had characterized the party in
its old form, and fostered its centralist, authoritarian
structure. Hitler now finally became the exclusive central
will,

'to whom were directed the party's members' desire for
self-surrender, service and subordination, their weariness
with responsibility, who alone knew how to pick up this
desire and translate it into the redeeming political act'.(6)

He rewarded his 'faithful, unshakeable shield bearer', as he once called Goebbels,(7) by exceptional advancement at the beginning of his career and by giving him the distinction of being the partner and organizer of his private social life.
Later a perceptible reserve entered their relationship. In so far as it was not due to purely tactical considerations — the wish to undermine the Minister of Propaganda's patently excessive self-confidence by the well-tried method of the cold shoulder — this reserve may have sprung from Hitler's distrust of the practised adroitness with which Goebbels always managed to adapt himself to circumstances.

In fact, these over-emotional declarations are by no means
to be taken as honest statements of Goebbels's feelings; the
exaggeratedly demonstrative accent alone is enough to make
them profoundly dubious. All too often Goebbels 'met his
Damascus', and his various conversations were never
dependent upon an inner voice but upon an opportunist eye
for the bigger battalions. 'I am an apostate', he once
confessed.(8) It was first and most consistently to himself that he applied that conviction of man's total guidability which later enabled him to organize whatever was asked of him: cheering and riots, pogroms, trust in the Fuhrer, and the will to resist. The only clear brain within the party Old Guard, he was at the same time the least independent, and lacking in any personal core.

I am only an instrument, / on which the old god
Sings his song. / I am only a waiting vessel,
Into which Nature pours the new wine / with a smile,

he wrote as a student.(9) Destitute of any inner conviction himself, he merely knew how to place the convictions of others decoratively and effectively on display. He once
admiringly confessed that the reason why Hitler was so dangerous was that he believed what he said. (10) He himself, on the other hand, was never in his life able to believe
what he said and concealed this shortcoming — which he fully
understood to be a weakness behind a front of cynicism. The soft, sentimental interior side of his nature, which yearned for dull but cosy certainties, was overlaid by a sober scepticism, and nothing that his longing for faith could
construct stood up to the probing of his inquisitorial
intelligence. The occasional cry of jubilation of the early
days, 'I believe again', or the formula credo ergo sum
expressed all too clearly the hunger of the rationalist for
a share in the heightened emotions and the self-forgetfulness of others, and significantly what the object of his hunger for faith might be was a matter of complete indifference to him.

'What matters is not so much
what we believe; only that we believe.' (11)

That the son of a strictly Catholic working-class family
from Rheydt in the Rhineland (12) should have found his ostensible certitude of faith, after years of agonizing
indecision, in the National Socialist movement is a stroke of historical irony. Highly gifted, he was subjected from an early age to a tormenting feeling of physical inadequacy; he had a weak constitution and a crippled foot. When he appeared in Geneva in 1933 as representative of the Reich, a
caricature in a Swiss newspaper showed a crippled little man
with black hair. Under it was written:

'Who is that? Oh,
that's the representative of the tall, healthy, fair-haired,
and blue-eyed Nordic race!'(13)

This joke throws light on some of the difficulties Goebbels found himself up against in the midst of the old followers of Hitler, especially the rough
SA. As a man with a physical deformity and an intellectual, he was something of a provocation to a party that regarded, not intellectual ability, but muscular strength and racial heritage, fair hair and long legs, as qualifications for genuine membership. The designation 'our little doctor', which quickly established itself, shows the sort of
contemptuous esteem in which Goebbels was always held by his
well-built, feeble-brained fellow fighters of the early
days. In spite of their admiration for his demagogic
brilliance, they were always suspicious of him. To their
coarse slow-wittedness his rationality, his coldness always
appeared strange and even 'un-German', and for a long time
he was looked upon as a 'pupil of the Jesuits and a half
Frenchman'.(14) It was almost as a challenge to the human type demanded and moulded by the movement when he wrote:

'We are not content with opinions. We seek to confirm and deepen
these opinions. We want clarity, clarity. Faith moves mountains, but knowledge alone moves them to the right place. In knowledge we seek clarity and the definition of our feelings.' (15)

Sentences such as this mark his intellectual distance from the type of mind predominant in the NSDAP, who, as Goebbels once said,

'has in his heart that which he does not have in his head, and, which is the main thing, has it in his fists. (16)

Undoubtedly Goebbels suffered from not being like everyone
else. Above all, at the beginning of his rise to power, as
Gauleiter of Berlin — when he depended upon the absolute
loyalty of an SA detachment whose criteria of merit were an
uncritical activism, an athletic taste for violence and the
dullest 'normality' — he found his authority repeatedly
subjected to irritating curbs. (17) Like Mirabeau (and equally
in vain) he may at times have asked God to bestow upon him
that mediocrity from whose simple raptures he felt himself
excluded. This was the source of his hatred of the
intellect, which was a form of self-hatred, his longing to
degrade himself, to submerge himself in the ranks of the
masses, which ran curiously parallel with his ambition and
his tormenting need to distinguish himself. He was
incessantly tortured by the fear of being regarded as a
'bourgeois intellectual' and hence disqualified. His shrill
anti-bourgeois complex (18) sprang from this problem, as did his painfully exaggerated attitude of loyalty to the person of Adolf Hitler: it always seemed as though he were offering blind devotion to make up for his lack of all those
characteristics of the racial elite which nature had denied
him. Because his intellectualism and his physical deformity
combined to make him particularly vulnerable among his
rivals for power, he developed into an uninhibited
opportunist with an exceptional nose for the power
relationships in his circle. In the internal conflicts of
direction within the party Goebbels, by virtue of his
temperament and his intellectual consistency, often found
himself on the ideological wing, yet he always managed to
switch in good time to the side of the majority. (19)

Tactical moves merely camouflaged the dichotomy, however,
and with all his aptitude for self-deception he could not in
the long run refrain from calling himself to account, even
if more or less involuntarily.

'Everything within me revolts
against the intellect,' he wrote early on. And then,
betraying the real cause of all his tensions and
awkwardness: 'My foot troubles me badly. I am conscious of
it all the time, and that spoils my pleasure when I meet
people.' (20)

He also tried continually to offset the bitter consciousness
of his deformity. His hunger for status and prestige and the
strained style of his early literary efforts, based on the
language of military commands, bear witness to this. He
liked to see himself as hard and manly, but it was the
forced hardness of a sensitive young man — who once made a
pilgrimage to lay a bunch of wild flowers on the grave of
the poet Annette von Droste-Hulshoff. Only in unguarded
romantic moods, as for instance in his helplessly
sentimental poems, did he allow himself to depart a little
from his stern ideals. His whole literary and propaganda
output displays three curiously contrasting layers:
alongside the stylistic and intellectual succinctness of his
day-to-day political contributions is the foolishly strained
pose of the fighter and finally the stammering bombast of
his private jottings. 'In them/dwells a poet and a soldier',
he makes the girl Hertha Holk say in his juvenile work
Michael, (21) after he himself had been graded 'fit for non-combatant duties only' and had just seen his first literary works fail. The very name of the hero, Michael, to whom he gave many autobiographical features, suggests the
way his self-identification was pointing: a figure of light, radiant, tall, unconquerable. He too is the son of a peasant, who strides over 'steaming clods' and feels the blood of his forefathers rising 'slow and healthy' within him.

'I don my helmet, draw my sword and declaim Liliencron.
Sometimes I am overcome by a sort of spasm. To be a soldier!
To stand sentinel! One ought always to be a soldier,' wrote
Michael-Goebbels. (22)

The fraudulent claim to having fought at the front which he made in his book, as in his later speeches when he used the phrase 'We who were shot up in the World War', was intended to suggest that his crippled foot
was the result of a war wound. The deception seems to have
been successful for an astonishingly long time. (23)

No doubt the same feeling of physical inferiority also
provided the essential impulse behind his erotic activity.
Both the wide range of his various affairs, as revealed by
those parts of his private diary that have been found, and
the tone of these confessions very clearly betray the desire
to appear 'a hell of a fellow', even if only in his own
eyes.

'Alma sends me a postcard from Bad Harzburg,' he notes
in his diary. 'The first sign of life since that night.
Alma, the teaser and charmer. I quite like this girl. First
letter from Else from Switzerland.' (14th August 1925.)
'Little Else, when shall I see you again? Alma, you lithe,
lovely flower! Anka, I shall never forget you.' (15th August
1925.) And a little later: 'Yesterday Hagen together with
Else. Celebrated my birthday together. She gave me a nice
coloured cardigan. A sweet night. She is a good darling.
Sometimes I hurt her bitterly. What a budding, bursting
night of love. I am loved! Why complain.' (28th October
1925.) But a few days later his mood changes: 'Over me and
women there hangs a curse. Woe to those who love you. What
an agonizing thought. One is ready to despair.' (10th
November 1925.) And finally he comes to the conclusion:
'Such is life: many blossoms, many thorns, and — a dark
grave.' (18th July 1926.) In any such case: 'Marriage would
be torment. Eros raises his voice!' (29th July 1926.)(24)

Such outpourings by a man who after all was twenty-eight years old contrast with countless affirmations of an excessive self-confidence, which at all times turns abruptly into self-pity or, through a trivial demonization of his own ego, threatens a plunge into the void. Then he writes, for
example:

I am reading Gmelin's Temudchin(the Lord of the Earth). Every woman rouses my blood. I run hither and thither like a
hungry wolf. And yet I am shy as a child. Often I can hardly
understand myself. I ought to get married and become a
philistine! And then hang myself after a week! (25)

The Lord of the Earth, the feelings of a wolf, satiety and a
profound insecurity. In so far as it was not sheer
necessity, such impulses undoubtedly helped to persuade this
academic, whose professional career had so far been a
failure, to enter the NSDAP at the end of 1924. To reassure
his worried parents he worked for a short time in a bank,
after completing his studies, and then took a job as caller
on the stock exchange, before finally, as secretary to a
nationalist politician, he came into contact with the
National Socialists. As a collaborator of Gregor Strasser he
belonged first to the social-revolutionary North German wing
of the party which, in its 'proletarian' anti-capitalist
tendencies, differed markedly from the 'Fascist' South
German wing. In Goebbels it found one of its most consistent
spokesmen. 'I am the most radical. Of the new type. Man as
revolutionary,' he noted, almost ecstatically, in his 'diary
of those years,(26) and in his 'Letters to Contemporaries' he passionately dissociated himself from the bourgeois half-heartedness of the politicians of the German National
People's Party.

'Tools of destruction they will call us,' he
wrote in that characteristic tone of self-regarding
revolutionary fervour. 'Children of revolt, we call
ourselves with a poignant tremor. We have been through
revolution, through revolt to the very end. We are out for
the radical revaluation of all values'; people would 'take
fright at the radicalism of our demands'.(27)

Even at that time he announced, 'In the last analysis better go down with Bolshevism than live in eternal capitalist servitude', and thought it 'horrible that we and the Communists bash in each
other's heads'.(28) In an open letter to 'My Friend of the Left' he listed a whole catalogue of convictions and attitudes in common, among them fundamental agreement on the
need for social solutions, common enmity towards the bourgeoisie and the 'lying system', as well as the fight 'for freedom' waged 'honestly and resolutely' by both sides, so that ultimately the only division remained the tactical question of the most appropriate means.

'You and I,' Goebbels finished his letter, 'we are fighting one another although we are not really enemies. By so doing we are
splitting our strength, and we shall never reach our goal. Perhaps the last extremity will bring us together. Perhaps!' (29)

These questions raised by the socialist wing of the movement
brought Goebbels into violent conflict, above all, with the
so-called 'Munich group', the 'Munich big shots', as he
called them. (30) During this controversy, at a party congress in Hanover early in 1926, he made the famous demand

'that the petty bourgeois Adolf Hitler shall be expelled from the
National Socialist Party'.(31)

But three weeks later, at a meeting called by the 'South Germans' in Bamberg, when he compared the external trappings, the prosperity and the
great domestic power around Hitler with the material poverty of the Strasser group, he began for the first time to waver. True, he found Hitler's talk on Bolshevism, foreign policy, redemption of the rights and holdings of the princes and private property 'terrible' and spoke of 'one of the
greatest disappointments of my life'; but when Hitler
publicly embraced him shortly after a speech, Goebbels
called him in gratitude 'a genius' and noted emotionally in
his diary: 'Adolf Hitler, I love you'.(32) Six months earlier
he had asked himself who this man really was, 'Christ or St
John? ' Now, notably under the influence of a generous
invitation to Munich and Berchtesgaden, his last doubts
vanished, while simultaneously his ambition recognized the
outlines of the role he might play. If Hitler was really
'Christ', then he wanted to be the one to take the part of
the prophet; for

'the greater and more towering I make God, the greater and more towering I am myself'.(33)

In this sense it really was apt when he wrote that the days in Munich with
Hitler had shown him his 'direction and path': the organizer
of the Fuhrer myth had found his mission. During his stay,
he wrote in his diary:

The chief talks about race problems. It is impossible to
reproduce what he said. It must be experienced. He is a
genius. The natural, creative instrument of a fate
determined by God. I am deeply moved. He is like a child:
kind, good, merciful. Like a cat: cunning, clever, agile.
Like a lion: roaring and gigantic. A fellow, a man. He talks
about the state.-In the afternoon about winning over the
state and the political revolution. It sounds like prophecy.
Up in the skies a white cloud takes on the shape of the
swastika. There is a blinking light that cannot be a star. A
sign of fate? (34)

From this point on he submitted himself, his whole
existence, to his attachment to the person of the 'Fuhrer',
consciously eliminating all inhibitions springing from
intellect, free will and self-respect. Since this submission
was an act less of faith than of insight, it stood firm
through all vicissitudes to the end. 'He who forsakes the
Fuhrer withers away,' he would say. (35) Three months later in the autumn of 1926 Hitler rewarded him for this change of front by making him a Gauleiter 'with special mandatory powers' at the head of the small, conflict-riven party organization in Berlin. The hectic, noisy atmosphere of the
city particularly suited Goebbels's quick, street-urchin
nature. Very early on he had realized that 'history is made
in the street', that 'the street is the political
characteristic of this age'.(36) Now, by following this maxim to the limit, he rose within a few months to be the city's most feared demagogue. First of all, in order to get himself talked about, he and a tough body-guard organized beer-hall battles, street brawls, and shooting affrays; one chapter in which he described this period carries the title 'Bloody
Rise'. Shortly before this he had written:

'Beware, you
dogs. When the Devil is loose in me you will not curb him
again.' (37)

His practice of stirring up fights was the logical application of a new, completely Machiavellian principle of propaganda. The blood which the party's rise cost among its own members was regarded, not as an inevitable sacrifice in the struggle for a political conviction, but as a deliberate means of furthering a political agitation which had recognized that blood always makes the best headlines. As he stated in a speech of this period:

That propaganda is good which leads to success, and that is
bad which fails to achieve the desired result, however
intelligent it is, for it is not propaganda's task to be
intelligent, its task is to lead to success. Therefore no
one can say your propaganda is too rough, too mean; these
are not criteria by which it may be characterised. It ought
not to be decent, nor ought it to be gentle or soft or
humble; it ought to lead to success. If someone says to me,
'Your propaganda is not at a well-bred level', there is no
point in my talking to him at all. Never mind whether
propaganda is at a well-bred level; what matters is that it
achieves its purpose. (38)

With the aid of these maxims directed exclusively towards
success, Goebbels made considerable breaches in the massive
front of so-called 'Red Berlin'. In the foreword to a
collection of the essays which he had published during this
period in his newspaper Der Angrif he speaks with
astonishment of the 'incredible freedom' he was allowed by
the Republican authorities; and this volume is indeed one of
the most damning pieces of evidence of their lack of the
will to assert themselves, their infinite helplessness in
the face of their sworn enemy.

'Put pressure on your
adversary with ice-cold determination,' he says, describing
his own demagogic tactics. 'Probe him, search out his weak
spot; deliberately and calculatingly sharpen the spear, hurl
it with careful aim where the enemy is naked and vulnerable,
and then perhaps say with a friendly smile, Sorry,
neighbour, but I can't help it! This is the dish of revenge
that is enjoyed cold.' (39)

There are countless examples of his method of fighting. For
months on end he concentrated his attacks on the Berlin
Police President Bernhard Weiss, whom he continually
referred to as 'Isodore Weiss'. When the courts forbade him
to use this name he simply attacked the 'Isodore System'. He
called Police President Karl Zorgiebel the 'publicity goy in
the Police Praesidium'; the Reich Chancellor Hermann Muller,
who had formerly been in the earthenware industry, a
'traveller in water closets'; Philipp Scheidemann a 'salon
simpleton' — all without ever being seriously called to
account. When a friend criticized him for his malicious
attacks on Bernhard Weiss, who had been a gallant officer
and was a man of integrity, he explained cynically that he
wasn't in the least interested in Weiss, only in the
propaganda effect. 'For our agitation we use whatever is
effective.' (40) Through middlemen he circulated scandalous rumours against Carl Severing and was delighted when the democratic press 'fell into the trap'. During the campaign against the Young Reparations Plan he openly admitted that he had never read what he was so passionately attacking.
'Propaganda has absolutely nothing to do with truth! ' In one article he called the Reichstag a 'stinking dungheap' and blatantly stated that the parliamentary mandate merely served to allow the NSDAP 'to equip itself with democracy's
own weapons from the democratic arsenal'.(41) With the same
frankness he described the purpose of an election as 'to
send a sabotage group into the exalted house', and finally,
during the legislative period of 1928, he wrote:

'I am not a member of the Reichstag. I am an IdI. An IdF. An Inhaber der Immunität[possessor of immunity], an Inhaber der Freifahrtkarte [holder of a free-travel ticket]. What do we care about the Reichstag? We have been elected against the
Reichstag, and we shall use our mandate in the spirit of
those who gave it to us.' He concluded, 'Now you are
surprised, eh? But don't think we're already at an end. This
is only the overture. You will have a lot more fun with us.
Just let the play begin!'(42)

A classic example of his mastery of propaganda comes in an article of 31st May 1931 entitled 'The Marshal President':

The presidency of the man to whom we here turn our attention
was a deadly tragi-comedy; it was based on a fundamental
lack of character and an inability, cloaked in a dignified
gravity, to see things as they really were. It is indeed
painful to have to register the existence of a man merely
because he was President of the Republic, a man whose
grotesque insignificance raises in us the astonished
question: How was it possible for this nincompoop to become
Commander of the Imperial Army and President of the
Republic? (43)

Only at this point did the article reveal that the man
referred to was not, as everyone was bound to think and
meant to think, the Reich President von Hindenburg, but the
French President MacMahon. When Brüning refused a challenge
to a public debate, Goebbels had one of the Chancellor's
speeches recorded and refuted it paragraph by paragraph in
the Sportpalast, to the accompaniment of yells from his
followers. One of his admirers aptly called him the

'Marat of Red Berlin, a nightmare and goblin of history' who
wanders 'around the house of this system like a crow around
a carcass. A ratcatcher. A conqueror of souls.' (44)

With the coming of the world economic crisis the masses flocked to
him, and he showed extraordinary skill in mobilizing their fears. As early as 1926 he declared in his pamphlet Die Zweite Revolution (The Second Revolution):

'We shall achieve everything if we set hunger, despair, and sacrifice on the march for our goals. It is my will that we light the
beacons in our nation till they form a single great fire of
Nationalist and Socialist despair.'

Now he openly welcomed the collapse, (45) and did all he could to add fuel to the fires of despair.

'To unleash volcanic passions, outbreaks of rage, to set masses of people on the march, to organize hatred and despair with ice-cold calculation':

this was how he saw his self-imposed task. (46) And he succeeded. With
diabolical flair, continually thinking up new tricks, he
drove his listeners into ecstasy, made them stand up, sing
songs, raise their arms, repeat oaths — and he did it, not
through the passionate inspiration of the moment, but as the
result of sober psychological calculation at the desk. Once
he had got the reaction he wanted he stood there, small but
erect, generally with one hand on his hip, above the tumult,
coolly assessing the effect of his stage management. In
truth, the 'little doctor' with the tormenting feeling of
physical inadequacy was capable of bending the masses to his
will and making them available for any purpose; he could, as
he boasted, play upon the national psyche 'as on a piano'.(47) Out of Horst Wessel, the SA leader who was shot by a rival, at least partly for reasons of jealousy, in a fight over a whore, he created the movement's martyr; after a meeting-hall battle in the Pharus rooms in North Berlin he created the heroic type of the 'Unknown SA Man'; with a kind of underworld pride he made the name 'Chief Bandit of Berlin', applied to him by hostile agitators, his honorary title; he invented slogans, hymns and myths, and made capital out of every defeat. Tireless, tenacious, stubborn: propaganda has absolutely nothing to do with truth! Its success rested rather, as he provocatively confessed, on an appeal to the 'most primitive mass instincts'.(48) He played a decisive part in the NSDAP's election successes wrung from the honest routine propaganda of the democratic parties. Immediately after 30th January 1933 he boasted that

'his propaganda had not only operated directly by winning over
millions of supporters; equally important was its effect in
paralysing opponents. Many had become so tired, so fearful,
so inwardly despairing as a result of his onslaughts that in
the end they regarded Hitler's Chancellorship as fated.'(49)

His reward came in the middle of March 1933 when Hitler
openly broke the coalition agreement to bestow upon him the
long-planned Ministry for National Enlightenment and
Propaganda. On taking office Goebbels cheerfully announced
that

'the government intends no longer to leave the people to
their own devices'. It was the task of the new ministry 'to
establish political coordination between people and
government'.(50)

Skilfully riding the crest of a wave of consent made up of
countless misunderstandings and blindnesses, he achieved
this coordination in an amazingly short time and maintained
it through all the phases of the regime right up to the end.
Certainly the terrorist threat in the background effectively
helped, but then the very essence of totalitarian government
always lies in the combination of propaganda and terrorism.
It is these two together that alone make possible that
thoroughgoing psychological and social organization of man
which reduces the scope of individual freedom to the point
of immobility. But we must not overestimate the part played
by compulsion, and even such a critical observer, not
subject to terrorist intimidation, as the American
journalist William L. Shirer, has confessed that this
propaganda

From the way the role of Goebbels in the further history of
the Third Reich, after his promising beginning, at first
continuously fell in importance and then, towards the end of
the war, suddenly and significantly rose again, we can
clearly see to what extent he — and with him National
Socialism — had made his way to power by mobilizing moods of
protest and resentment; indeed, it shows the extent to which
the totalitarian propagandist needs an enemy. So long as the
young minister's energies were absorbed in building a
flawless apparatus of propaganda and surveillance and the
fight against internal political resistance still furnished
the required material for the psychological manipulation of
the masses, the problem remained concealed. Then, however,
it emerged all the more distinctly, especially as resort to
the creation of outside enemies was barred for a long time
while the government strove to win recognition for itself.

In consequence Goebbels was pushed into the background, at
first almost imperceptibly. His writings at this time also
remain curiously dull and empty. He may have realized this,
since he did not publish them in a collected edition, as he
did his writings during the period of struggle and later
during the war years. Explaining his waning influence at
that time, he once stated that he often looked back with
longing to the years before the seizure of power, when there
was something to attack.(52) Only when inner and outer political consolidation had progressed far enough for the control hitherto exercised to be abandoned did Goebbels find
in the increasingly unrestrained practice of anti-Semitism
by the state new possibilities into which he threw himself
with all the zeal of an ambitious man worried by a constant
diminution of his power. Thus the man who in earlier years
had frequently mocked the primitive anti-Semitism of
nationalist politicians now became one of the most
relentless Jew-baiters. Unquestionably, personal motives
also played a part; possibly his hatred of the Jews was an
externalized form of self-hatred. A man who conformed so
little to the National Socialist image of the elite and
whose fellow pupils are said at one time to have called him
'the Rabbi' (53) may have had his reason, in the struggles for power at Hitler's court, for offering keen anti-Semitism as a counterweight to his failure to conform to a type:
ideological rectitude to counterbalance typological deviation. His attitude may also have had something to do with the fact that shortly before the onset of the great wave of anti-Semitism in 1938 he had risked his own prestige
and that of the party by a passionate love affair, and was
obsessed by the urge to rehabilitate himself. But whatever
his real motives, it is fairly certain that Goebbels himself
did not take the race theory seriously; one of his
colleagues reported that during his twelve-year period in
office Goebbels never once 'so much as mentioned it' inside
the Ministry. (54) The opportunist and tactical motives behind his anti-Semitism are also evident from the fact that the measures he took to purify German culture of foreign
influences were directed predominantly against the representatives of a spirit far nearer his own inclinations than the oppressive National Socialist approach to art, which he himself now propagated. Lastly, everything seems to
indicate that in Goebbels's anti Semitism, over and above
individual motives, we must see an example of that dialectic
common to all totalitarian propaganda: the need for a
barbarically exaggerated image of the opponent. This helps
to harness the aggressions within a society while attaching
the latent positive energies to emotional idealizations of
its own leader figures. Only in this way could propaganda
regain that vehemence which had once brought it such
success, even if there was always an obvious element of
strained artificiality about the demonized figure of the Jew
as presented by Goebbels with ever more breathless efforts.
All his attempts to paint the universal enemy as a
wirepuller at work from Moscow to Wall Street were shattered
by the reality of the frightened and harassed human beings
wearing the yellow star, who for a time wandered the streets
of German cities before suddenly vanishing forever.

How much Goebbels's propaganda owed to the friend-enemy
stereotype is also shown by a comment of Hitler's, which he
proudly noted in his diary in 1943, to the effect that he

'is one of the few who today know how to make something
useful out of the war'.

The important thing about this first word of praise from Hitler for a long time is that it coincided with the turning-point in the war, for up to that
time Goebbels, for all his efforts, had not succeeded in winning back the ground he had lost. Even towards the end of 1939 his rival Rosenberg had noted with satisfaction a statement by Hitler that for the duration of the war the Propaganda Minister must be kept as far as possible in the
background. (55) With the first crises and set-backs, on the other hand, when propaganda abandoned the unprofitable tone of confidence in victory in favour of a growing bitterness,
and switched from contempt for the enemy to hatred, Goebbels
made his long-prepared comeback. He showed once again his
old impudent adroitness, his cynical art of sowing confusion, and with an enemy to hate he also regained that great rhetorical fervour which had once won him the reputation of being the party's best speaker, superior even
to Hitler. (56)

This was proved not only by his articles in the periodical
Das Reich, in which he adopted the principle of at least
one surprising concession to truth each time, but also by
the inventiveness with which he wore down the enemy's nerve
by broadcasts over the front lines, by mobilizing fear of an
imaginary fifth column, and other means. He invented new
terms, such as 'Coventrization', and later, according to the
state of the war, the formula of the 'advantage of the inner
line'. He deftly usurped the enemy's V-sign as a symbol of
Germany's own confidence in victory, discouraged undesirable
behaviour by the creation of easily understood characters
like the 'coal grabber' or that threatening black shadowman
who announced from every wall that the enemy was listening.
Finally, faced with the growing hopelessness of the military
situation, he invented the 'secret weapon'. The astonishing
effect of his ideas once more confirmed Hitler's assertion

'that by the clever and continuous use of propaganda a
people can even be made to mistake heaven for hell, and vice
versa, the most miserable life for Paradise'.(57)

Preoccupied as he was with propaganda, it was, as one of his colleagues
confirmed, 'almost a happy day' for him when famous
buildings were destroyed in an air raid, because at such
times he put into his appeals that ecstatic hatred which
aroused the fanaticism of the tiring workers and spurred
them to fresh efforts. He strove for hours after the
Stalingrad disaster to get Hitler's permission to stage a
spectacular requiem, which finally took place in vast and
sombre splendour. He achieved one of his greatest triumphs
as a speaker when shortly afterwards he put his famous ten
'evocative questions' to an invited audience in the
Sportpalast, raising them to a consciousness of being
representative of the nation, and 'in a turmoil of wild
emotion', as he wrote afterwards, won agreement to total
war. Every sentence, every effect, every heightening of the
emotional temperature in this speech, down to the
electrifying final phrase, 'Now, nation, arise — storm,
break loose!' had been carefully calculated days in
advance. Even before he set out for this gathering he had
confidently predicted:

'Today there will be a demonstration
that will make the thirtieth of January rally look like a
mother's meeting.(58)

But he took every care not to allow
himself to be carried away, to see to it that he remained
the organizer, never the victim, of his own propaganda
effects, even if he did not always succeed in this, and
occasionally found himself caught in the grip of his own
demagogy. When later, faced with the enemy's approaching
front, he played on the spectre of the 'Asiatic hordes' with
all the means at his disposal, he at the same time called
Soviet propaganda 'the best horse in the stable' and toyed with the idea of a separate pact with the East: (59) a
Machiavellian through and through, he desired power in
exactly the same degree as he despised its objects.

In fact, Goebbels's career can be explained only on the
basis of a deeply rooted contempt for humanity. Again and
again the revealing expression 'man the beast' (Canaille Mensch) occurs in his private jottings, (60) a favourite
formula to express his humiliated personality. Opponents,
friends, supporters and finally the whole nation never meant
more to him than raw material for achieving successful
effects and bolstering his self-exaltation and power. The
tirades of hate and the festive Sportpalast — they all came
from him and in purpose and execution were nothing but
cynically admitted gimmicks. He could speak to the hearts of
millions although not one word came from his own heart; he
manipulated souls and ideas and himself: it was all one. As
the coldest and most unscrupulous calculator among the top
leadership, he was entirely free from that 'burden of
conscience' the removal of which from the whole nation
Hitler had announced as his historic mission. (61) What urged
him on throughout his life was the hatred felt by the weak,
crippled and deformed which found satisfaction only when he
could drive 'with ice-cold calculation' the healthy, those who were not crippled, through all the stages of delusion,
intoxication and exhaustion. He seemed always anxiously
trying to prove to the world that intelligent deformity was
superior to dull-witted normality. In a report on apolitical
discussion he noted, 'I dominated'. All his life he sought this consciousness of power. And if his physical weakness
was the source of so many sufferings and tensions, it was
certainly also one of the essential factors in his rise. He
once recalled with amusement the statement of his old form
master after his valedictory address that although he was
gifted he was not cut out to be an orator, (62) which only
proves the point that a shortcoming may be the cause not
only of great failure but also of great achievement.

Just as he himself only used other people, so he allowed
himself right up to the end to be used without demur,
without a thought of revolt. During the last phase of the
war, he not only regained and actually heightened his power
and prestige but also to a great extent recovered his
personal position of trust with Hitler, so that there was no
feeling of having been slighted which might have prompted
him to follow an independent line. True, he showed a certain
tendency to think for himself after realizing that Hitler
was beginning to lose his earlier intuitive certainty; but
the attachment retained its strength, and up to the last he
extolled 'the height of good fortune that allowed me to be
his contemporary'.(63) Even out of the ruins of the shattered Reich Chancellery he brought up again insanely and against his better knowledge the myth which he had once created that 'together with this man you can conquer the world'.(64) The
attempt had failed. But true to his principle that the
propagandist must never contradict himself he continued —
with Russian tanks already in the suburbs of Berlin — to
call Hitler the only man who could point the way to a new
and flourishing Europe. (65) If the German people never shouted over Adolf Hitler the dreaded 'Crucify him! ' it was largely due to Goebbels. But he himself, when all was manifestly lost, stood among the smoking debris and shouted 'Hosanna!' as he had once predicted, the paradoxical picture of an opportunist who at the last proved to be the most loyal
follower. But what looked like loyalty was merely the
realization of his own lack of substance, which all his
life, despite all his gifts, forced him into the role of
substitute. He liked to hear himself referred to as the
movement's Talleyrand, but he was certainly not that. 'I
never pursued a policy of my own,' (66) he repeatedly asserted.
Very true!

Unhesitatingly he accepted Hitler's end as his own. Unlike
the former comrades in arms who ignominiously fled — Ley,
Ribbentrop, Streicher — but also without the naive
self-deception of Goring or Himmler, he had no illusions as
to how intensely they had provoked the world.

'As for us,'
he wrote in Das Reich of 14 November 1943, 'we have burnt
our bridges. We cannot go back, but neither do we want to go
back. We are forced to extremes and therefore resolved to
proceed to extremes.' And later: 'We shall go down in
history as the greatest statesmen of all time, or as the
greatest criminals.'

He was level-headed enough to accept responsibility for the final verdict. For this reason he pressed Hitler, who as always was shrinking from important
decisions, to await the end in the Reich Chancellery and add
the crowning apotheosis to the artificially constructed
myth. His last concern, to which he devoted himself with
alert and tenacious resolution, was with a practised hand to
make the end itself a spectacle of breathtaking grandeur.
His remarks in his farewell conversation with Hans
Fritzsche, in which, following Hitler's example, he ascribed
the collapse to the failure of the German people, and at the
same time the way he strove to intensify the process of
destruction, were like a final seal set upon his contempt
for humanity. 'When we depart, let the earth tremble!' were the last words with which, on 21st April 1945, he dismissed
his associates. (67) What he seemed to fear more than anything else was a death devoid of dramatic effects; to the end, he was what he had always been: the propagandist for himself. Whatever he thought or did was always based solely on this
one agonising wish for self-exultation, and this same object
was served by the murder of his children, on the evening of
1st May 1945. They were the last victims of an egomania
extending beyond the grave. However, this deed too failed to
make him the figure of tragic destiny he had hoped to
become; it merely gave his end a touch of repulsive irony. A
few hours later he died, together with his wife, in the
gardens of the Reich Chancellery.

'The essence of propaganda', he once remarked, 'consists in winning people over to an idea so sincerely, so vitally,
that in the end they succumb to it utterly and can never
again escape from it'.(68)

By this standard, he undoubtedly failed; for the idea of National Socialism has been forgotten, or is at most only a memory. However, on closer
inspection this maxim of propaganda proves to be itself no
more than propaganda; in reality, totalitarian propaganda
does not count on exercising a permanent influence. It bears
witness to its own knowledge of the futility of its efforts
in the capricious abruptness with which it alters watchwords
and 'granite principles', demands damning judgements or
oaths of loyalty, hails the deadly enemy of yesterday as the
faithful ally of today, brands the friend a traitor,
revokes, annuls, rewrites its history, and obtains from the
people protestations of faith in each of its erratic changes
of course, wiping out at each switch all previous truths and
oaths of loyalty. There can be little doubt that Goebbels
was occasionally aware of this, and his early words 'But
scratch our names in history, that we shall do,' (69) now
sound like an anticipatory reply. Certainly he succeeded in
this aim. It was probably a matter of indifference to him
whether he figured in history as a criminal or a statesman,
but how wretched is his fame compared with what it cost.